Helping consumers be more savvy

Savy.io is a shiny new startup that provides users with a personal data account built on HAT technology and then lets them share information in return for cash, discounts and other rewards.

Encouraging users to control and understand their data is at the heart of the Savy mission.

“Savy offers a combination of saving money and making money, all based on finding value from your information,” says founder and CEO Oscar Vickerman.

“By letting users hold their own data with tools to allow them to share it, they can start to understand how to make the most of their information.

“This will allow them to derive value from their data in all sorts of ways such as making better purchasing decision, but there are many other sources of value – saving money on cashbacks and discounts, being paid for your opinion on polls, taking part in market research for brands who want your view on what you like and don’t like. All these things are valuable.”

Savy has a beta product in the market accepting data sources including Monzo, Fitbit, Twitter, Facebook, BioBeats and Dropbox.

Technical lead Ramsey El-Khazen explained what the HAT means for Savy’s value proposition:

“As a HAT service provider we have to adhere to certain principles. One of those is that any data that goes into your HAT – your Savy account – must be visible to you. You know what’s in there and control it.

“When data goes out – what we call a data debit – it’s very clear what the terms are. Nothing goes out by surprise. You’re not going discover later that data has been syphoned off to a third party. It’s your own personal micro server. Nobody else can access it.”

Savy evolved out of B.heard, a comparison site that is about values as much as value. Users can express opinions about anything from the environment to ethical supply chains and B.heard uses that data to find matches with appropriate brands and services.

Nick Johnson, who heads up operations, says: “We started out as the UK’s first values comparison site to encourage people to think about their values when making purchasing decisions, particularly in essential services like insurance, banking and energy. We’re trying to disrupt the comparison market.”

By leading on simple, tangible rewards in return for sharing information plus a positioning that promotes individual empowerment and personal values, Savy and B.heard are hoping to appeal to consumers who might not be engaged in the data rights debate.

“GDPR will be a big catalyst for people’s rights over their data but it’s not a very sexy term,” says Nick. “Millennials, particularly, won’t engage with that. That’s why we talk about values discovery and our emotive connection to data – the sense of wanting to discover yourself.”